The cornerstone of LNCS's editorial policy is its unwavering commitment to report the latest results from all areas of computer science and information technology research, development, and education. LNCS has always enjoyed close cooperation with the computer science R & D community, with numerous renowned academics, and with prestigious institutes and learned societies. Our mission is to serve this community by providing a most valuable publication service.

LNCS commenced publication in 1973 and quite rapidly attracted attention, not at least because of its thus far unprecedented publication turnaround times. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed a substantial growth in the series, particularly in terms of volumes published. In the late 1990s we started experimenting with LNCS electronically and soon realized that we had to develop a systematic approach to providing LNCS in a full-text electronic version, in parallel to the printed books. Another new feature introduced in the late 1990s was the conceptualization of a couple of color-cover sublines. Still, original research results reported in proceedings and postproceedings remain the core of LNCS.

In 2002, the number of new proposals for LNCS publications grew and is now growing faster than ever before: many new workshops and conferences are being set up and we envisage LNCS as their publication platform; and a number of established conference series and workshop series, currently publishing their proceedings with other publishers, are knocking at the door of LNCS. A LNCS milestone was the publication of its 2500th volume: Automata, Logics, and Infinite Games, edited by Erich Grädel, Wolfgang Thomas, and Thomas Wilke.

All volumes are published simultaneously in printed version and electronically, most of them in time for conferences, and selected titles in our print library have also been added to our digital library. In November 2002, the 1000th volume of LNCS went online. Fortunately, our efforts and investments in developing LNCS Online as the series' digital library are recognized in the community as a valuable service: there are over 150,000 full-paper downloads per month from LNCS Online, and our digital library now holds over 35,000 papers written by over 50,000 individual scientists and professionals.

LNAI was established in the mid-1980s as a topical subseries of LNCS focusing on artificial intelligence. This subseries is devoted to the publication of state-of-the-art research results in artificial intelligence.
As with the LNCS mother series, proceedings and postproceedings are at the core of LNAI; however, all other sublines are available for LNAI as well.
The topics in LNAI include automated reasoning, automated programming, algorithms, knowledge representation, agent-based systems, intelligent systems, expert systems, machine learning, natural-language processing, machine vision, robotics, search systems, knowledge discovery, data mining, and related programming languages.

The first LNBI volumes were released in 2003. The topics in LNBI are genomics, molecular sequence analysis, recognition of genes and regulatory elements, molecular evolution, protein structure, gene expression, gene networks, combinatorial libraries and drug design, and computational proteomics.

These include Tutorials, State-of-the-Art Surveys, Hot Topics, ACM Distinguished Theses, etc. We established the Festschrift subline in 2002, because computer science, or at least some of its pioneering contributors, have come of age, and more and more proposals honoring individual researchers and their work on the occasion of jubilees are being submitted.

Another innovation is the LNCS Journal color-cover subline. In this subline, we offer publication of topically focused edited volumes, the papers of which are selected through a journal-like reviewing and revision process - each of these journals has its own editor(s)-in-chief and its own editorial board.

The first such journal, the LNCS Journal on Data Semantics was launched in 2003. In 2004 we launched a further subline, the Transactions on Rough Sets, and later the Transactions on Computational Systems Biology and the Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development.

Over the years the number of LNCS publications has increased at a staggering rate, from about 25 in 1981 to more than 495 in 2005. No doubt, this dramatic increase in publication reflects the series' success.

In 2005 alone, 498 volumes were published in the series with a total of around 260,000 pages. This corresponds to no fewer than 23,000 papers written by roughly 66,000 scientists and professionals.